Loyalty programs provide consumers with incentives to shop at certain loyalty program participating facilities or to show loyalty to a particular merchant or service provider, such as a financial institution. In addition, to receiving discounts or financial awards, an incentive may include redeemable goods or services, or special recognition of some sort, such as an upgrade. Often, financial institutions, such as an issuing bank or acquiring bank, support the loyalty program. Loyalty programs may be associated with various transaction programs such as a credit card program, a charge card program, a debit card program, a prepaid card program, or a gift card program.
A degree of success of a loyalty program is how well it can target consumers that will participate in the program in order to receive the incentives described and provided as part of the loyalty program.
These loyalty programs are typically constructed, marketed, qualified, fulfilled, or refined with limited interaction between the various participants of the programs, which may include merchants, financial institutions such as acquirers and issuers, transaction handlers such as credit card companies, and consumers such as an account holder. For example, a merchant wishing to participate in a co-branded credit card program may be confined to loyalty program features set by the issuing bank such as a credit limit, a bonus mile to purchase ratio, or a redemption option thereby not being able to finely target the merchant's potential consumers. The level of loyalty program feature confinement is especially prominent among merchants with a smaller portion of the market.
Moreover, loyalty programs may be developed with limited access to detailed transaction data. For example, some loyalty program participants, such as financial institutions, may rely on their own transaction data history to determine the type of incentive to provide. However, this data history may be limited in scope depending on the degree of transaction specificity the issuer collects or is able to maintain. Similarly, merchants wishing to set up a loyalty program may solicit financial institutions for information, gaining limited access to the full scope of the transaction data. Even if a merchant gains access to the transaction data, the transaction data may not be in a form the merchant can effectively utilize.
The lack of uniformity in handing transaction data may hamper accurate communication between participants of the transaction program. For example, acquirers may identify a single merchant differently; one acquirer may identify a merchant by its name and address while another acquirer may identify the same merchant by its name and franchise store number. Similarly, each participant of the loyalty program may be accustomed to processing transaction data in a particular format that may not be the same as the format of another participant of the loyalty program. For example, an airline company may analyze transaction data in units of “bonus miles per dollar” while an issuer may record dollars spent per month.
Therefore, packaged loyalty program services of a financial institution may not properly meet the needs of merchants that could otherwise benefit from loyalty programs. Often, loyalty program participants lack detailed information about transactions and, thus, fail to create an effective and targeted program that is refined to meet the specific needs of those funding the programs. It would be an advance in the art to provide a platform for collaborating to develop, implement and refine transaction programs in a way that lessens the foregoing drawbacks.